Livestrong VP Morgan Binswanger reflects on 'hard year'

One year ago, the world saw Lance Armstrong’s sit-down with Oprah Winfrey, in which the cyclist confessed to having used performance-enhancing drugs to help his wildly successful cycling career.The interview came on the heels of increased pressure from investigations into his past performances, sponsorship withdrawals and even a parting of ways with the cancer foundation, Livestrong, that Armstrong himself founded.

Morgan Binswanger is Livestrong’s executive vice president of Government Relations and External Affairs and reflected on the past year in an interview with POLITICO.

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“It’s definitely been a hard year, there’s no question,” Binswanger said. “I think the year has been as hard as it could have been.” Binswanger said, in the middle of December, that fundraising for 2013 was down “about 30 to 35 percent,” which was actually “better than we had forecasted for this year.”

The group lost some of its major sponsors, such as Nike, and Binswanger said the organization has had to spend much of the past year not talking about its core mission of helping cancer patients because “we’ve been on the crisis management circuit.”

“We have to keep it in perspective and, as much as we understand that people are going to be asking about, ‘OK, what’s next?’ or ‘What was the last year like?’ our job is to focus on our mission and our constituency and that’s what I think we really missed this year. That’s what we emotionally missed. That’s been hard. That part has been hard.”

And yet, Binswanger says, the last year has been instructive, at the very least, and even “liberating” in some respects.

“It’s allowed us to both refocus on the core execution of what we do. … It’s made us truly focused on listening to the cancer community and it’s something that we’ve always been very good at but it sharpened the blade a little bit, so to speak, and that’s been really valuable. … I think this has also been somewhat of an, oddly reinvigorating year for the organization to shake up things we’ve been doing the same way for a while.”

Binswanger says the past year made the organization realize that not everybody “knows what we do and why we do what we do.” In the wake of Armstrong’s confession, numerous articles ran exploring whether Livestrong served not simply as an advocacy organization for cancer victims but also as a convenient celebrity platform and financial aid for Armstrong.

“The liberating factor has been being able to talk about not only what we do but why we do it,” Binswanger said.

Binswanger said the group’s Washington efforts, which have always been significant (the Chronicle of Philanthropy noted in 2013 that “Since 2001, Livestrong has spent $3.56-million on federal and state lobbying”), haven’t been affected by Armstrong’s fall from grace.

“I think if we were a brand new organization that somebody of Lance’s stature had started, I think that would be a really hard thing,” said Binswanger, adding that “D.C. is certainly a place where we’re going to continue to be working. … We do a lot of work with [Affordable Care Act] implementation, we’re spending a lot of time on that.”

But “what we know, as 15 years old, is that we have an enormous amounts of relationships and data to provide to policymakers in presenting the voice of cancer patients. … Our tenure allows us, certainly within the policy world to make a pretty clear and concise case that has very little to do with the celebrity factor that you’re referring to.”

Although clearly wounded by Armstrong’s tarnished reputation, Binswanger isn’t overly eager to throw the cyclist under the bus.

“I want to echo that Lance has always been very, very committed to the cancer fight and over the course of 15 years, there are very few people who have remained committed to an issue and those who have been really effective and I think Lance has been one of those, to impact change over a long period of time instead of just going to one chicken dinner.”

He later added: “One of the things that got lost in the course of the Lance stuff is that Lance started the foundation before he was very famous. He came out of his treatment and wanted to do something and he started this foundation before anyone knew who he was, before the Tours, before all this stuff. And I think that speaks to the power of individuals doing great things, whatever that is, and trying to do something, in this case serving people who are in great need. People can make a difference.”